AP (“Israel begins preparations for Gaza exodus as Egypt lobbies against Trump plan“):
Israel said on Thursday it has begun preparations for the departure of large numbers of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip in line with President Donald Trump’s plan for the territory. Officials meanwhile said Egypt has launched an diplomatic blitz behind the scenes to try and head off the plan.
The Trump administration has already dialed back aspects of the proposal after it was widely rejected internationally, saying the relocation of Palestinians would be temporary. U.S. officials have provided few details about how or when the plan would be carried out.
The Palestinians have vehemently rejected Trump’s proposal, fearing Israel will never allow the refugees to return and that it would destabilize the region. Egypt has warned that such a plan could undermine its peace treaty with Israel, a cornerstone of stability and American influence in the Middle East for decades.
Saudi Arabia, another key U.S. ally, has also rejected any mass transfer of Palestinians and says it will not normalize relations with Israel — a key goal of the Trump administration — without the creation of a Palestinian state that includes Gaza.
Trump and Israeli officials have depicted the proposed relocation from war-ravaged Gaza as voluntary, but the Palestinians have universally expressed their determination to remain in their homeland.
Trump and Israeli officials have not said how they would respond if Palestinians refuse to leave. But Human Rights Watch and other groups say the plan, if implemented, would amount to “ethnic cleansing,” the forcible relocation of the civilian population of an ethnic group from a geographic area.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said he has ordered the military to make preparations to facilitate the emigration of large numbers of Palestinians from Gaza through land crossings as well as “special arrangements for exit by sea and air.”
There were no immediate signs of such preparations on the ground.
NPR (“Israel defense minister tells army to prepare to relocate Palestinians from Gaza“):
Israel’s defense minister is telling the military to prepare to implement President Trump’s plan to relocate Palestinians from Gaza.
Defense Minister Israel Katz says the military should prepare exit options by land, sea and air so that anyone who wishes to can leave for “any country willing to accept them.”
Katz, however, is already getting pushback from one of the countries he called on to accept refugees. He says Spain, Norway, Ireland and other countries that have criticized Israel’s actions during its war against Hamas should take them in.
“Their hypocrisy will be exposed if they refuse to do so,” Katz said in a statement.
[…]
In an interview Wednesday on Fox News, Netanyahu called President Trump’s proposal for a U.S. takeover of Gaza a “remarkable idea” that should be “pursued.”
“I think it will create a different future for everyone,” Netanyahu said.
Steve Erlanger, NYT (“Trump’s Gaza Plan Has Many Pitfalls, Hamas Among the Biggest“):
President Trump took the world aback with his declaration that the United States was going to “own” Gaza and move out the Palestinians there to build “the Riviera of the Middle East.” As unrealistic and bizarre as it may seem, Mr. Trump was pointing to a serious challenge: the future of Gaza as a secure, peaceful, even prosperous place.
A former French ambassador to Washington, Gérard Araud, put the dilemma neatly. “Trump’s proposal for Gaza is met with disbelief, opposition and sarcasm, but as he often does, in his brutal and clumsy way, he raises a real question: What to do when two million civilians find themselves in a field of ruins, full of explosives and corpses?”
That is an issue Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has always dodged. He has refused to engage on the question of who will rule Gaza after the conflict, largely because it would undermine his governing coalition, which depends on far-right parties that want to resettle Gaza with Israelis.
As outlandish and unworkable as Mr. Trump’s proposal on Tuesday may seem, it is “no less than an historic resetting of decades of received diplomatic wisdom,” said Chuck Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser. However unrealistic, he said, “it may force the sides to reconsider long-held positions, stir things up dramatically and lead to new openings.”
What Mr. Trump described — the forced relocation of two million Palestinians from Gaza to countries like Egypt and Jordan that are fiercely opposed to taking them — is not going to happen, said Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London.
“Trump is a man who doesn’t want new military commitments, and now he wants to move two million people who don’t want to go to places that don’t want them,” he said. “But Trump picks up on a real problem, about how to reconstruct Gaza. The important thing with Trump is to pick out the real issues and deflect the stupid ones.”
[…]
Michael Milshtein, an Israeli analyst of Palestinian affairs, said that in discussions with Jordanian, Egyptian, Gulf Arab and Palestinian colleagues, “no one even wants to discuss this deal, because there will be no readiness of Hamas to evacuate Gaza, and I cannot find one Arab country or leader willing to accept the Palestinians.”
Even if nothing comes of Mr. Trump’s proposal, just floating it now is threatening the stability of Jordan and Egypt, two crucial allies in the Middle East with the longest history of diplomatic relations with Israel and, thus, is “strategically incomprehensible,” said Tom Phillips, a former British ambassador to Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Jordan already is more than half ethnic Palestinian, and for King Abdullah, who will meet with Mr. Trump next week, to accept more Palestinian refugees “would undermine the kingdom and be the end of the king,” Mr. Milshtein said, a judgment echoed by many. Already, many Jordanians are suspicious that there is “a Zionist conspiracy” to annex the occupied West Bank and create a Palestinian state out of Jordan, he and Mr. Phillips said.
Egypt may have more acreage and is in desperate need of American financial aid, but its president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, is a fierce opponent of Islamist radicalism, which he has tried to stamp out brutally in the Sinai, and of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a part. The notion that he would allow “hundreds of thousands of people supporting Hamas into Egypt” is unthinkable, Mr. Milshtein said.
CNN (“How Trump arrived at his stunning idea to ‘take over’ the Gaza Strip“):
Trump administration officials are hurrying to catch up to the president’s audacious and improbable plan for the United States to take ownership of Gaza and redevelop it into a “Middle Eastern Riviera,” trying to wrap their heads around an idea that some hope might be so outlandish it forces other nations to step in with their own proposals for the Palestinian enclave.
President Donald Trump’s idea — announced Tuesday evening at a joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — was formulated over time, people familiar with the matter said, and appeared to originate with the president himself. It was only the latest reminder that policy ideas often start with Trump, rather than slowly build through national experts before ultimately reaching the Oval Office for discussion.
At its root, officials said, this suggestion was intended in part to spur action on an issue Trump viewed as moribund, with no other nations offering reasonable solutions for how to rebuild an area that has been obliterated by Israeli bombardment following Hamas’ October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks.
However it came about, his unveiling of the idea — which he delivered by reading off notes in the East Room — came as a shock.
One adviser on Middle East issues had not heard the proposal until Trump raised it during his news conference. The official described themselves as stunned.
But others said Trump had run the idea by people in the days ahead of the Netanyahu talks. His Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, who visited Gaza last week, returned to Washington with a dire impression of the devastation he witnessed, conveying to Trump and later to reporters a view that it was no longer habitable.
[…]
The president’s comments took several Cabinet members in the East Room by surprise. As Republican leaders watched from Capitol Hill, they too were caught off guard by the remarks.
The proposal for Gaza has not come up in private meetings Trump has held with GOP members of the Armed Services Committees, aides said, even though the ceasefire and broader challenges across the Middle East were key points of discussion as late as last week.
“No,” a senior Republican aide told CNN. “Not a word of this was ever mentioned by the president.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was traveling in Guatemala, heard the idea for the first time as he watched Trump’s news conference with Netanyahu on television. The Middle East has been dramatically reduced from his portfolio, with Witkoff, the president’s longtime friend, serving as the US envoy to the region.
Rubio, who Trump said had been patched in by telephone to his meetings with the Israelis “listening to every single word that we say,” wrote on social media afterward: “The United States stands ready to lead and Make Gaza Beautiful Again. Our pursuit is one of lasting peace in the region for all people.”
It was less clear whether Netanyahu knew precisely what Trump intended to say, but the smile that grew across his face made clear that he liked what he heard.
Reading between the lines, President Trump communicated no plan to anyone on his team and they first heard about it when he told the world because there is no plan. His Middle East advisor told him, in so many words, that Gaza is a shithole and Trump the real estate developer saw an opportunity for turning it into a resort. Netanyahu, who always wanted to get the Palestinians out of Gaza, has seized on the idea and is preparing to execute a mass deportation.
To where? Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party is having an impromptu meeting.
AP (“Pro-Trump Arab American group changes its name after the president’s Gaza ‘Riviera’ comments“):
A group that played a key role in Donald Trump’s voter outreach to the Arab American community alongside his allies is rebranding itself after the president said that the U.S. would “take over” the Gaza Strip.
Bishara Bahbah, chairman of the group formerly known as Arab Americans for Trump, said during a phone interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday that the group would now be called Arab Americans for Peace.
The name change came after Trump held a Tuesday press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House and proposed the U.S. take “ownership” in redeveloping the area into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
“The talk about what the president wants to do with Gaza, obviously we’re completely opposed to the idea of the transfer of Palestinians from anywhere in Historic Palestine,” Bahbah said. “And so we did not want to be behind the curve in terms of pushing for peace, because that has been our objective from the very beginning.”
Arab Americans for Trump helped lead voter outreach efforts for Trump ahead of the 2024 presidential election in swing states such as Michigan and Arizona.
The group, independent from the Trump campaign, frequently facilitated meetings between Arab American community leaders and Trump’s allies, including Richard Grenell, now serving as Trump’s envoy for special missions, and Massad Boulos, the father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany and now a senior adviser on Arab and Middle Eastern affairs.
In the 2024 election, Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to win Dearborn, Michigan — home to the nation’s largest concentration of Arab Americans — since 2000 on his way to winning the state. Trump visited Dearborn on Nov. 1.
Bahbah said the group had been thinking about changing its name for “a while” and ultimately made the decision Tuesday. But Bahbah had said during a phone interview just prior to Trump’s Tuesday night press conference with Netanyahu that the group’s name was Arab Americans for Trump.
Reuters (“‘I thought we voted for America first’ – Trump Gaza plan divides his party“):
U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposal that the U.S. take over the war-torn Gaza Strip prompted confusion and skepticism from some of his fellow Republicans on Wednesday, while others backed his “bold, decisive” idea.
[…]
The idea prompted international condemnation and some dissent from Republicans in Congress, who have largely fallen in line behind Trump’s initiatives such as pausing foreign aid and eliminating thousands of federal workers.
Skeptical lawmakers said they still favored the two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians that has long been a foundation of U.S. diplomacy. Some also rejected the idea of spending U.S. taxpayer dollars or sending in U.S. troops to a region that has been devastated by more than a year of war.
“I thought we voted for America first,” Republican Senator Rand Paul said on X.com. “We have no business contemplating yet another occupation to doom our treasure and spill our soldiers blood.”
Republicans hold narrow majorities in Congress over Democrats, who rejected the idea outright. “That is ethnic cleansing by another name,” Senator Chris Van Hollen said on MSNBC.
Republican Senator Jerry Moran said the idea of a two-state solution cannot just be thrown out. “It’s not something that can be unilaterally decided,” he told reporters.
Senator Lisa Murkowski said she would not speculate about any possible proposal to send U.S. forces into a region “that has seen enough turmoil.”
“I don’t even want to speculate to that question, because I think that is quite frightening,” she said.
House Speaker Mike Johnson praised the plan as “bold, decisive action to try to secure the peace of that region.”
Johnson said he would discuss the issue with Netanyahu when he meets with him at the U.S. Capitol on Thursday.
“I think people understand the necessity of it, and we’re going to stand with Israel as they work towards this goal. And we’ll stand with the President on his initiative,” Johnson told a news conference.
[…]
Representative Tim Burchett, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he supported Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. should develop valuable Gaza waterfront property.
“I think Americans and capitalism have a real opportunity to cause some real change in the world, and that would be a perfect example of that,” he told Reuters.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he favored “bringing peace and stability and security to that region,” but that every idea would have to be thoroughly vetted.
Well, this will certainly cause some real change in the world.
